Carl Rakosi 100 years old, photo by Gloria Graham, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003

PoetryDispatch No. 304 | December 18, 2009

Carl Rakosi

The Country Singer

There ain’t nothing special about me.
Everybody knows I’m too fat
And my legs are too short.
I’m just a middle-aged cornball
With a loud voice
And a drinking problem.
It’s a funny thing,
When I’m on stage
All I do is act like me.
But I can act me
Like a son of a bitch!

Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 25, 2004) was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.

Rakosi was born in Berlin and lived there and in Hungary until 1910, when he moved to the United States to live with his father and stepmother. His father was a jeweler and watchmaker in Chicago and later in Gary, Indiana. The family lived in semi-poverty but contrived to send him to the University of Chicago and then to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During his time studying at the university level, he started writing poetry. On graduating, he worked for a time as a social worker, then returned to college to study psychology. At this time, he changed his name to Callman Rawley because he felt he stood a better chance of being employed if he had a more American-sounding name. After a spell as a psychologist and teacher, he returned to social work for the rest of his working life.

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rakosi edited the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. His own poetry at this stage was influenced by W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. He also started reading William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. By 1925, he was publishing poems in The Little Review and Nation.

By the late 1920s, Rakosi was in correspondence with Ezra Pound, who prompted Louis Zukofsky to contact him. This led to Rakosi’s inclusion in the Objectivist issue of Poetry and in the Objectivist Anthology. Rakosi himself had reservations about the Objectivist tag, feeling that the poets involved were too different from each other to form a group in any meaningful sense of the word. He did, however, especially admire the work of Charles Reznikoff.

Like a number of his fellow Objectivists, Rakosi abandoned poetry in the 1940s. After his 1941 Selected Poems he dedicated himself to social work and apparently neither read nor wrote any poetry at all. A letter from the English poet Andrew Crozier about his early poetry was the trigger that started Rakosi writing again. His first book in 26 years, Amulet, was published by New Directions in 1967 and his Collected Poems in 1986 by the National Poetry Foundation. These were followed by several more volumes and he gave readings across the United States and Europe.

In early November 2003, Rakosi celebrated his 100th birthday with friends at the San Francisco Public Library. Upon his death Jacket Magazine editor John Tranter observed the following:

Poet Carl Rakosi died on Friday afternoon June 25 at the age of 100, after a series of strokes, in his home in San Francisco. My wife Lyn and I were passing through California in November 2003, and we stopped by to have a coffee with Carl at his home in Sunset. By a lucky coincidence, it happened to be his 100th birthday. He was, as always, kind, thoughtful, bright and alert, and as sharp as a pin. We felt privileged to know him.

other Norbert Blei web pages

Please click the arrow to see the complete list of writers on Poetry Dispatch & other Notes from the Underground, then click a writers name to see all entries. The number next to the writers name indicates how many postings belong to this category.

Please click the arrow to see the complete list of writers on Poetry Dispatch & other Notes from the Underground, then click a writers name to see all entries. The number next to the writers name indicates how many postings belong to this category.

The coop has flown

Email Subscription to Poetry Dispatch & Other Notes from the Underground

Please enter your email address to subscribe to Poetry Dispatch & Other Notes from the Underground and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 725 other followers

Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

metropolis | the shop | on-line source for jazz, improvised, innovative, adventurous and unheard music. We listen to music and read artists who don’t even exist yet. The Shop is part of the metropolis media group.